Bowling Shirts and Pleated Pants: Rag & Bone Fall/Winter 2014

New York Fashion Week is still just over a week away, but that didn't stop Marcus Wainwright and David Neville of Rag & Bone from jumping the gun and showing their fall/winter 2014 collection last night. In lieu of the usual seated affair, the duo held it in a bar set-up while the runway show took place along the space's perimeter with photos and videos of the models and detail shots of the clothing projected against the walls. "We're just trying to do something original," Wainwright said this morning via phone. "Generally in menswear, I personally feel things have become a little formulaic and redundant—we're just trying to mix things up."

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Admittedly, it can be difficult to parse out all the details of a collection when models are whizzing by in the typical format, so using Wainwright's love of photography to add a bit more context to the collection was a nice touch. "We wanted it to be about telling the story of thirty different characters," he added.

The clothes had a pared-down, real world feel to them, and that was exactly the point. "We didn't want to do something pointlessly conceptual because guys don't usually care," Wainwright said of the collection that fused a 50s American working class staples (think bowling shirts) with a casual take on British military pieces from the 80s and 90s (like strong outerwear). If this sounds like a lot, it was—but it was anything but overwrought. There was a definite less-is-more approach, like with a plain white T-shirt paired with pants that featured railroad conductor stripes or a fur-collared bomber worn with pleated pants (which Wainwright says is, "probably the hardest thing in the world to make look cool." Spoiler alert: Theirs did.)

"It's about being more realistic about menswear, more down-to-Earth," Wainwright conceded about the collection's overall feel. Mission accomplished.

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